September 23, 1995

Hospital Official Resigns The chairman of the department of anesthesia at Long Island Jewish Medical Center has resigned in the midst of a state investigation that followed three patient deaths and several injuries this spring. Page 25. Balkan Foes Prepare to Talk Much of Bosnia seemed to be settling into tense expectation yesterday as the fighting became more subdued and the warring parties maneuvered for position before talks scheduled for Tuesday in New York. Page 4. In Pursuit of the Presidency The publishing executive Malcolm S. Forbes Jr. formally began his campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination yesterday, promising lower taxes to free the economy from "political repression." Page 10.

Breaking his long silence, O. J. Simpson rose today to explain his failure to testify, and to reiterate his innocence, his faith in the jury and his love for his family. Then both sides in the Simpson trial rested, and Judge Lance A. Ito laid out the law to jurors who will soon decide the defendant's fate. In a gesture that left prosecutors and the father of one victim literally trembling with rage, Mr. Simpson turned a routine waiver of his right to testify into a mini-oration before the jury entered the room. Aside from an occasional "Yes, your Honor" and one "too tight," it was his first public statement in months. For all its seeming spontaneity, one member of the defense conceded that it was two weeks in the works.

Since January, the Democrats have been out of power in Congress. Today, they showed just how far out of it they are. They staged a hearing on the front lawn of the Capitol to demonstrate explicitly how the Republicans are shutting them out of one of the biggest undertakings of the new majority -- revamping Medicare, the nation's health-care system for the elderly.

Capping a week of major legislative developments that have astonished this usually blase capital, the Republicans who seized control of Capitol Hill last November pressed ahead today with further plans to dismantle Federal medical aid for the poor and radically reshape Federal medical aid for the elderly. Today's events in Washington, which came on the heels of the Senate's vote early this week to abandon the 60-year tradition of Federal assistance to all poor children, compounded an atmosphere of change so tumultuous as to verge on revolution. Perhaps not since the Hundred Days at the start of the New Deal, to which many of the programs now under attack can trace their origins, has Congress moved with such speed on so many fronts.

Ending a tumultuous five-week courtship, Time Warner Inc. and Turner Broadcasting System said yesterday that they would merge their sprawling operations, reinforcing Time Warner's position as the world's largest communications company. Time Warner said it would buy the 82 percent of Turner it did not already own in a stock deal worth roughly $7.5 billion. Ted Turner, the maverick founder of the Cable News Network and the chairman of Turner Broadcasting, is to become vice chairman of Time Warner.

In the V.I.P. lounge at Rio de Janeiro's international airport, Lidia Pinto Machado seemed calm and determined, far younger than her 65 years. As the plane rose for the 11-hour flight to New York -- where she would claim her daughter's body, confront the political maelstrom her killing in Central Park had caused, and clean out her apartment -- she raised her hands before her, in a gesture more of surrender than entreaty. "God be with us," she whispered. Twenty-four hours later, Ms. Machado, sleepless and dazed, left her daughter's apartment on West 56th Street with a shopping bag on her arm. Her daughter-in-law, Martha Molnar, was bleary-eyed from going through Maria Isabel Pinto Monteiro Alves's belongings, including the books overturned on the bed, the family photos. After a dizzying day of talking with the Mayor, the press, the Police Commissioner, the Governor's office and the Brazilian consul general, both women seemed to have grown old overnight.

An Air Force surveillance plane taking off from a base in Alaska yesterday crashed in a forest and exploded in a ball of fire. Officials said that there were no known survivors among the 24 people who were aboard the four-engine Boeing jet, called an Awacs plane.

The spokeswoman at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn is the wife of the former Democratic Speaker of the State Assembly, Stanley Fink. The dean for finance and development is married to another former Democratic Speaker, Mel Miller. The husband of the top aide to Irene H. Impellizzeri, a member of the city's Board of Education, works at the college, as does the wife of a Brooklyn Democratic district leader. The first thing that almost everyone says about Leon M. Goldstein, the president of Kingsborough and the man who has emerged as Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's choice to be the next Chancellor of New York City's schools, is that he is a shrewd politician who has forged close ties to influential elected officials. They rarely say he is an educator.

The short interest tables in Business Day yesterday, showing the number of shares that had been borrowed and sold by traders, included erroneous figures supplied by the New York Stock Exchange for the monthly change in the uncovered short sales of two stocks -- Mylan Laboratories and Texas Instruments. And the related article referred incorrectly to the change for Mylan. Adjusted for stock splits, the short interest in Mylan rose by 961,198 shares, while that of Texas Instruments declined by 54,069 shares.

An article on Wednesday about a New Hampshire woman's lawsuit against the Ford Motor Company over the death of her daughter in a car not equipped with an air bag misstated the history of court decisions on whether Federal safety law pre-empts state law. A majority of decisions around the country, but not all of them, have held that Federal law prevails.

International 2-5 BALKAN FOES PREPARE FOR TALKS As fighting continued in some areas, the warring parties in Bosnia shifted their attention from the battlefield to making peace, maneuvering for position before talks scheduled for Tuesday in New York. 4 Muslims returned to a town to find destruction and a mystery. 4

A chart in Business Day yesterday about changes in the telecommunications industry since the 1984 breakup of the AT&T Corporation reversed the date labels in comparing the costs of a five-minute telephone call between New York City and Los Angeles in 1984 and in 1994. The call cost $2.70 in 1984 and $1.40 in 1994.